Teams of Super Mutants worked together to build vats for the new batches of FEV to be cultivated in, under Shephard’s watchful eye. Tiberius was the one actually giving out instructions to the subordinates, making sure that they set everything up correctly, but the Overmaster had to be present as well or the others would just beat the poor little runt into a pulp.

A bright purple flash suddenly lit up the room. “Boss, I’m back, yep.”

“Is the fighting over?” Shephard asked.

Zap nodded as he stepped up alongside the Overmaster. “Last of us at Project Purity and Exodus are dead or ran away, yep. No extra damage done, yep.”

“And Rivet City?” Shephard pressed, interested to know how the humans had handled mutated ghouls.

“The Dunwich monsters damaged the ship and some got inside, yep,” Zap reported. “Humans won in the end though, yep, since Rainbow Dash came back from Fort Bannister early, yep.”

Shephard raised an eyebrow and turned to the mechanic in surprise. “Fort Bannister has fallen already?”

The fact that Zap actually hesitated before answering was a sign that things had not gone to plan. “I checked, yep. Rainbooms had help from some giant blue monster, yep. None of them dead.” He glowered and crossed his arms. “Fawkes and the Hero of the Wastes got into Vault 87, too. Broke my workshop.”

That wasn’t good, though Shephard had to admit that Zap losing his verbal tic because he was so annoyed was a little amusing. Just as Shephard decided that it was time to decide on the Super Mutants’ next move, the door behind was slammed open and another hulking overlord stomped through. “What do you want, Brok? I’m busy.”

“Don’t care, Brok want speak!” Brok called out in a deep booming voice.

Shephard fought the urge to simply punch the Overlord out. Brok was massive even for an overlord, but his intellect was just as meager and degenerated as his fellows. The big lummox was usually fairly docile, content to let Shephard do any necessary thinking and focus on important matters like eating and collecting human femurs, but something had apparently gotten under his skin.

“This had better be important, Brok, I have a lot to do,” Shephard warned.

“You listen to what Brok say!” Brok bellowed, grabbing the attention of every other mutant in the room. “You weak! You lost! You ran away!” The overlord pointed a damning finger at Shephard. “You not Overmaster now! Brok Overmaster!”

Shephard scowled and clenched its fists in anger. Getting beaten by Horrigan had apparently undermined the Overmaster’s authority far more severely than expected. “If you think you’re strong enough to take charge, then let’s see you fight for it.”

Brok grinned and unhooked a tri-laser from his belt. The boxy little guns were deceptively powerful, firing out three loosely grouped beams that were capable of scything through even power armor with ease. “You die now!” All three beams struck Shephard squarely in the face. The sensation was mildly unpleasant. “Gun not work?”

Confused by the lack of damage, Brok pointed the tri-laser up at his own face. The beams blasted deep furrows through his forehead. Such a grievous wound would have crippled or killed a mere human, but overlords were made of sterner stuff. Brok reached up, felt the scorched ruin of his own head, then looked down at his gun in bewilderment. It took him a full twenty seconds for the oversized oaf to connect the dots, until finally he looked back up at Shephard. “You tough.”

“Obviously,” the Overmaster said in a condescending tone. “Make sure you remind the others, I don’t have time to deal with more of these pathetic leadership challenges. Now get out, I’ve got a lot to do.”

A thick blanket of decomposing corpses covered the riverbank. Clouds of flies buzzed over the hellish scene, and the stench was so overpowering that it brought tears to Rainbow’s eyes.

Technically, she was watching over Rivet City’s work crew as they gathered the dead ferals, ready for burning, but Rainbow suspected that Harkness had given her an easy job so she could get some rest. She had already double-checked to make sure that all of the ghouls were dead, so all she had to do was patrol the area and keep an eye out for any other threats coming towards the city.

Rainbow wished she had been allowed to scour the ship for stragglers instead. The timing of the attacks by the Super Mutants and feral ghouls couldn’t have been a coincidence, and the more she thought about it, the more she suspected that the Rainbooms had played right into someone’s hands. Hunting ferals in dark and cramped corridors would at least have been a good distraction. Thankfully, a distraction arrived in the form of one of the workers calling out, “Knight-Captain?”

“What’s up?” Rainbow asked eagerly.

“We’ve finished gathering the rotters,” the worker replied. “We’re just about to call in for a flamer to be brought out, then we’ll all head back inside.”

Rainbow shook her head and drew Flashburn. “No need, I’ve got this.”

There had ended up being way too many dead ghouls to stack altogether, so instead they had been piled up into a series of six-foot-tall mounds around the edge of the nearby parking lot. All of the workers were gathered nearby, using snow to scrub the tainted blood and gunk off their shovels and, in the case of two of them, their power armor.

The faint hubbub of conversation died away as Rainbow stepped up to the first mound. Perhaps someone else would have found something profound to say, but Dash couldn’t think of anything, so she just ignited Flashburn with a whoosh and touched it to the lowest body. Flesh bubbled and ran while muscles and bone started to char before the fire caught properly, but once it had the whole mound was swiftly engulfed in an azure conflagration.

Rainbow quickly repeated the process with the other mounds. Once they were all ablaze, the workers started packing up and heading back into the ship, but Rainbow stayed behind to watch the ferals burn. She wouldn’t feel comfortable until there was nothing left of them but ash.

“Sorry to interrupt, Knight-Captain, but there’s something I need to discuss with you,” the worker from earlier ventured quietly.

“What do you need?” She asked, not looking away from the flames.

“It’s about the big rotter in the river,” the worker replied. “We’re, uh, not sure what to do about it.”

The thought of the giant ghoul made Rainbow want to throw up, but she kept her expression neutral as she reluctantly turned away from the flames. “Let’s have a look at it.” Against her better judgment, she followed the worker over to the edge of the riverbank and peered in.

Surprisingly, the water was perfectly crystal clear. The downside to that, at least as far as Rainbow was concerned, was that it meant she could see the remains of the giant ghoul in all its grisly glory.

The mirelurks had already stripped the monster of its flesh and most of its muscle, and were now working on its internal organs. Rainbow noted belatedly that the ‘lurks were slicing off chunks of organ and, instead of eating it, were carrying away towards the broken bow before coming back for more.

“They’re storing the meat in their nest at the end of the ship,” the worker explained. “I know mirelurks can eat damn near anything; hell, I saw one eat a damned lamprey floater a few years back, but that thing, well…”

Rainbow tried to ignore the ghoul and focus on the mirelurks themselves. They were a lot brighter and more colorful than the ones everywhere else in the Wasteland, probably because of the sheer amount of magic in the water around Rivet City, but she couldn’t see anything that looked like a mutation or illness from eating the monstrous feral. “We’ll have the security team keep an eye on them. There’s not much we can really do about it until Twilight gets back anyway, unless you’ve got a crane stashed around here somewhere.”

“If only,” the worker muttered.

“Don’t worry about it. Worst case scenario, we’ll get Liberty Prime to drop a mini-nuke in there and do some fishing.” Rainbow turned to head back to the pyres, but paused as she spotted something swimming to the ghoul corpse alongside the mirelurks. The creature was mostly humanoid, save for the fact that it had webbed fingers and toes along as well as fins along its back and limbs, and it had pronounced ridges or gills adorning its thick neck. Rainbow had seen similar creatures back when she had gone inside a mirelurk nest for Moira, but she had never gotten around to asking about them. “Hey, do you know what that thing down there is? Is it some kind of mutant mirelurk, or something?”

The worker looked where she was pointing and nodded. “That’s a mirelurk king. I don’t know if they’re mutated or a separate species that just lives alongside the ‘lurks, but apparently you can find them around most of the bigger nests.”

“Huh, that’s freaky.” Rainbow watched as the mirelurk king swam up to the ghoul corpse and brought its head in close to the ghoul’s ribs. She couldn’t see what it was doing, but every few seconds it shifted slightly, slowly moving around one spot in particular. It was only when it reached in and yanked out a familiar crystal spike that Rainbow realized what it was after.

The king retreated with its prize, making room for other mirelurks to move in and start widening the hole that the spike had left. Rainbow suddenly understood why Moira had wanted to place an observer in a mirelurk nest. It was fascinating watching the crab-like creatures working together to systematically dissect the giant ghoul, their powerful claws making short work of everything they got hold of.

When the hole in the ghoul’s ribcage was big enough, one mirelurk actually forced itself halfway into the cavity, dislodging a bunch of foul black muck that almost seemed to melt away when it left the ghoul’s body. Moments later the mirelurk emerged once again clutching a jet-black hunk of meat.

“Holy shit, is that the rotter’s heart?!” The worker exclaimed loudly.

Rainbow was too engrossed in what was happening to reply. The mirelurk took the heart a short way away from the body, then a whole bunch of them suddenly swarmed it, tearing the organ to pieces in the blink of an eye. A faint boom sent a ripple through the water, followed by a ghostly wail as the discarded shreds disintegrated entirely.

“Wait a second,” the worker said slowly. “Isn’t that the same sound we heard when the science team burned some weird heart thing that Talon Company gave us? The technicians were all talking about it earlier.”

Rainbow couldn’t remember hearing much of anything during the actual fight, but she didn’t see any reason to doubt him. “If that’s true, then where the fuck did Talon Company manage to get their hands on the heart of one of those fuckers?!”

The worker shuddered. “I never even considered that there might be more of those things out there somewhere.”

Before Rainbow could reply, a loud splash caught her attention. The mirelurk king had climbed out of the water onto a particularly gnarled root and was staring up at the duo. It snorted, spraying water out of its nose, then casually tossed the crystal spike up onto the riverbank next to the pair and slipped back into the water.

Rainbow stared blankly at the crystal spike laying next to her feet. She was sure that it was a darker blue than it had been, and the little roots at the base had been twisted and reshaped to hold what looked like a perfect, fist-sized, faintly glowing pearl. “Uh… what the fuck?”

Next Chapter: Chapter 177 - Tell Your Tale Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 58 Minutes